


a visit to quantico

by screamlet



Category: White House Down (2013)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-01
Updated: 2016-10-01
Packaged: 2018-08-18 22:41:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8178757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/screamlet/pseuds/screamlet
Summary: The day after… everything, Donnie was escorted out of his apartment at the crack of dawn and led to the Presidential motorcade that had parked outside his building.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sinsense](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinsense/gifts).



The day after… everything, Donnie was escorted out of his apartment at the crack of dawn and led to the Presidential motorcade that had parked outside his building. One agent opened the door of the SUV and the agent that had pulled him out of bed now pushed him into the car.

President Sawyer raised his eyebrows and John Cale burst out laughing. 

“Roger,” President Sawyer called out. “You let him grab a pair of pants but not put them on before he left?”

“Roger loves me and likes to see me happy,” John said. “We go back a long time.”

Donnie motioned to himself, sitting across from John and the President in the old t-shirt he wore to sleep, his boxer briefs, and a pair of jeans spread across his lap. “This makes you happy?”

“I really can’t tell if I’m on the edge of hysteria from all the adrenaline or if it’s actual joy,” John said. “That’s super weird, I think. Is that super weird? Anyway, we’re gonna go to a bunker and take some depositions and I volunteered to pick you up.”

“Put your pants on, Donnie,” President Sawyer said.

“Sir, with all due respect—you don’t know what kind of heat he’s carrying,” John said. “Better let me handle this once we’re at the secure location for the day and you’re out of the vehicle.”

“You know, this is going in your 90-day performance review with Finnerty,” President Sawyer said. “You think I’m _not_ gonna mention shameless flirting with Donnie the White House tour guide when she asks for some managerial input?”

“Excuse me, Mr. President.” Donnie slid to the far corner of his side of the SUV and started to put on his pants. “I’m going to try to slip into something more comfortable, like dignity.”

This time, the President laughed. 

John smirked at him as he put on his pants, somehow grinning around his eyes without cracking a smile, and Donnie tried to keep whatever cool he had left. 

*

Eventually, the motorcade arrived at their secret destination. They weren’t in D.C. anymore, but somewhere remote and wooded—Quantico? There were a lot of swamps and forests near Quantico—

Someone approached the door of the SUV and Donnie thought: _oh, good, I’m going to die here, at least it’s quiet_.

Before he could think about what the fuck his brain meant by _that_ , the door of the SUV opened onto Finnerty, the Secret Service agent he recognized from the White House. Before Director Walker lost his goddamned mind and sold them all out to white supremacist mass murderers, Walker was often stalking around the Secret Service’s offices in the White House, starting most mornings with an aneurysm as he yelled _FINNERTY! WHAT THE HELL IS THIS!_ It never failed to wake Donnie up when their sad commissary coffee couldn’t. 

“Good morning, Mr. President,” Finnerty said. “I can escort you from here. Agent Cale will make sure Mr. Wright gets to where he’s going.”

“Donnie Wright?” John asked. “That is. Really cute. It sounds so trustworthy.”

President Sawyer climbed out of the SUV and held the door open for a moment. “Cale. Get his number. Good luck.”

The door closed and the car pulled away from the President and Finnerty and the second secret motorcade. Donnie looked across the way at John, who—holy shit, he was _blushing_?

“So your new boss, the leader of the free world, hit on me… for you?” 

“Well, that’s going in _his_ 90-day review,” John said. “I didn’t need help. And you—it was a joke, he's not—”

“This isn’t—you’re not like, in a literal gay panic, are you? I’m—yeah, obviously, you are criminally handsome and you would be my type if I ever thought I could unlock that level of hot—but this isn’t—it’s not because you John McClane’d around the White House yesterday and now you’re tasting your own mortality, right? And oh my _god_ , you shot a fucking _missile_ out of the Presidential limo and blew out the South Lawn.” 

“I gotta be totally honest with you,” John said. “Pretty much… none of that has sunk in yet because of the adrenaline. But you know what I do remember?”

“What?”

“You told me how to save my little girl,” John said. “She said you saved her life. And you tried to save a Ming vase from a guy with a swastika carved into his chest?! Oh, and you told me to set the White House on fire. Like, during those ten minutes we were actually on the tour.”

“Oh my GOD, is that why everything was on _fire_? You _remembered that_?”

“I remembered you,” John said. 

They stared at each other across the SUV. Donnie couldn’t think to do much except nod.

“And everything was on fire for a lot of reasons, okay?” John cleared his throat and mumbled, a little sheepishly, “Wasn’t just me. Terrorists and stuff.”

*

By the time Donnie was released from his _V for Vendetta_ -style interrogation room and returned the few possessions he had brought with him, it was four o’clock and he was crying in Quantico’s secret super underground lobby. He didn’t know where exactly they were or how he was going to leave this place, so Donnie sat on one of their horrible uncomfortable benches and sobbed his fucking eyes out across from the wide-eyed front desk person who had just picked up a phone, probably to have him dropped into another, even deeper hole like on _Scandal_. 

“Shit, shit, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m late.” Donnie wiped his hand across his eyes and saw John kneeling in front of him, one hand on the armrest of the bench and one hand on Donnie’s knee. “Hey, I’m sorry, the President told them to go easy on you because you’re super flawless and I told them the stuff you did when I gave my first deposition last night, like obviously you weren’t part of the inside ring that did all this, but—shit, it’s Quantico, they think they can do whatever they want.”

“Super flawless?” Donnie asked. “Are you _drunk_?”

“Come on, there’s a shitty commissary hamburger downstairs with your name on it and you’re gonna think it’s the best thing you’ve ever had because low blood sugar is hilarious like that.” John gave Donnie a hand up from the bench and led him to the elevator, an arm around his waist in a way that Donnie wanted to imagine was comforting not _please don’t file a lawsuit against the federal government_. 

“You’re too hot to be this nice,” Donnie said quietly. He stepped away from John and wrapped his arms around himself, putting another step between them. “Thanks, though.”

“What? Sorry, have you seen me? These ears? This face? Please, I’m—I’m really not. That suit yesterday was my one good suit and now it’s all in pieces and stuff all over the White House. I can never find shirts that fit me? My body is the worst. It’s so—I’m sorry, I should have gone to get you but I had President stuff and it ran late and they seriously never called me.” 

Donnie looked over; John was resting his forehead against the steel back wall of the elevator, eyes closed. “Every time I promise I’m going to be somewhere, the whole world makes sure that I can’t get there on time and I let everyone down. I’m sorry, okay?”

“You didn’t promise me anything.” Donnie wiped his face again and put a careful hand on John’s shoulder to get his attention. “Hey. It’s okay, I didn’t expect anything. I was gonna ask them to call a cab or something, I just had to sob hysterically in the lobby of a secret underground bunker for a few minutes first.”

“Yeah, Quantico sucks,” John said. “This is where they put people who suck. Us included, I guess.”

The elevator chimed and the door opened to a sterile white cafeteria out of a horror movie. Donnie held the door open for John and smiled at him.

“Buy me a burger?” Donnie asked. “I took all the cash out of my wallet to dry it out. You know, because the sprinklers went off when you set the White House on fire.”

“God, you do that one time,” John sighed. “Yeah, come on, I promised you a really bad burger. Dessert’s good, though. Totally recommend dessert.”

They each grabbed a cafeteria tray and Donnie managed to grab a burger and a bottle of water before he burst into tears again because John put a slice of cake on his tray without him having to ask. 

John panicked and added another slice to Donnie's tray, and then grabbed two bowls of pudding for his own tray before he picked up both trays and rushed to the cash register. He left Donnie to cry in front of the salad and dessert bar and wonder about this weirdly sweet idiot who was going to force feed him government pudding until he was okay again. 

The way this week was going, it could be a lot worse. 

*

When they finished eating, John led Donnie to another set of elevators, his hand on Donnie’s elbow like he was Orpheus leading Eurydice out of hell’s own government-funded labyrinth. 

“The burgers were so bad,” Donnie said.

“Pudding helped, though, right? They’re so dry and overcooked that only pudding rehydrates them again. #LittleArmySecrets.”

“You had pudding overseas?”

“One of my buddies over there, her in-laws got it into her head that the one thing she wanted, one thing she missed more than anything else on the military-approved snack list, were those pudding snack packs. They bought her tons of those, but she’s lactose intolerant. So most of the time, she’d trade them off or straight up give them to me and guess what?”

“What?”

“Pudding. Fixes. Everything.”

Donnie burst out laughing. 

“See?” John asked. “Made you laugh again. Did you think you’d ever laugh again while we were in this concrete bunker full of nightmares? Nope, but that’s my life secret: pudding fixes everything.”

“We’ve been underground too long,” Donnie said. “I only slept two hours last night. Do I even have a job anymore? Since—since there’s no _White House_?”

“Hey, did I tell you the Marilyn Monroe tunnels were real?”

“Wait, what?”

“That’s how me and the President got to the limo and blew up the Rose Garden.”

“Lawn, not Rose Garden. I saw video, the Rose Garden was something else. I don’t know.”

John held the door open to an elevator and stepped inside after Donnie.

“So, uh, Finnerty said that someone’s gonna call you tomorrow and find out if you want to join the White House Reclamation Force. I asked what the hell that was and she said they’re vetting people very, very slowly and you’re probably gonna be working with the Library of Congress people to identify literally every single thing lost or found or destroyed, if that’s something you want to do?”

“‘Course I do,” Donnie said. 

“You get a hazmat suit, too,” John said. “I think it’s mostly at the Library of Congress, though, but when they let you back into the White House, it’s all hazmat suits, baby. It was okay for _me_ to wander around there in a tank top, but now that they know better—”

“And you?” Donnie asked. “You’re on the President’s detail?”

“Yeah,” John said. “Yeah, that’s—we’re working really well together. And Finnerty’s taking over the Secret Service and now that I’m not a _total_ moron to her, I’ll—opportunities for advancement, man, that’s all I’m saying but it’s really cool.”

Just as Donnie thought that they had been in this elevator for close to a century, the doors chimed and slid open to an underground parking lot where a car was idling, waiting for them.

“So here’s your ride,” John said. “Uh. You should. If you want, you should like, I don’t know. Text me? Let me know you get back okay? It’s been a really long day and I get that Quantico is super freaky because that’s their whole thing here, so if you want to like, text me every five minutes and make sure they’re on track back to your house and not dumping you into a swamp _Godfather_ -style, that would be cool? If you feel like doing that. If you want to let me know that you’re—that you made it back okay.”

“Oh,” Donnie said. “Oh. You still. You want to do that. Yeah. Um. Yeah, okay.” He handed over his phone and didn’t ask how John opened it without his passcode. He didn’t have time; John had already texted himself from Donnie’s phone.

_Hi :) we’re gonna be ok :)_

Donnie smiled at the text and slipped his phone into his pocket, then grabbed John by the Secret Service suit jacket and pulled him in for a kiss that almost knocked all their front teeth out. They laughed in each other’s faces and John pulled Donnie in for another kiss, less like an impending claim on their dental insurance and more like a promise.

John broke the kiss and pressed his forehead to Donnie’s. “And tomorrow’s lasagna night for me and Em, if you want to impress my kid with brand new White House trivia she’s _definitely_ not gonna know.”

“Yeah,” Donnie said. “Yeah, that sounds like something we can do. Lasagna’s normal.”

“Right? Like _so_ normal.” John opened the door of the car for Donnie and ducked down to smile at him. “Have a totally normal ride back and if this starts driving into a swamp, remember to tuck and roll, okay?”

“Wait, don’t—”

“TEXT ME BYE.” 

The door closed and the car pulled away, John smiling at him through the tinted windows. Donnie waved back, then slouched as low as he could into the backseat for the most well-deserved nap of his life.

**Author's Note:**

> [twitter](https://twitter.com/screamlet) \+ [tumblr](http://screamlet.tumblr.com/post/151204870876/)


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